My company match goes into company stock. It's a solid match where we get 50 cents on the dollar up to 6%. Not the best but not bad. Now I subscribed to the theory to move that money into normal funds regularly as holding a significant sum in a single stock isn't smart and holding it in company stock is staking your current and future in the same company.

Was super pissed when my company acquired another major media company in a multiple billion dollar acquisition. Stock rose 30% in one day and hasn't dropped back down since. I just moved a huge chunk out of stock a week prior. All the guys I work with who never check it made tons on their 401ks that day bc they were too lazy or didn't know enough to move the money. True testament to the "rather be luck than good" theory. I still picked up a few hundred bucks over night but if I had never moved anything, it would have been several thousand. Doh.

In general, I know I'm playing the right move for long term, but it's been painful moving the money out of the company stock. It's gone up over 50% since Jan 1 and over 70% over the last year. Gotta think long term and absorb the pain of the short term gains that I'm missing out on, right? Ugh...

(I could make the most of it, but I don't check often enough to avoid effing myself if the stock starts to hurt)

You don't trust the stability of the funds? I was under the assumption that an indexed EFT was not that unlike an indexed mutual fund? They're just traded differently, I think. I don't currently invest in any but I have been looking.

Background: I work for a small college. We've weathered the recession well, but had some enrollment/retention issues last year which caused large mid-year budget cuts and staff reduction.

Since then, the VPs have been looking at cost cutting methods. They switched to a monthly pay cycle, rather than the bi-monthly pay period they'd had since the end of World War II. This was done instead of hiring a payroll clerk, according to the VP that runs HR. Very brazen about the "not hiring" part, too. (Yet they never stop hiring assistant coaches, because sports=students=$$$$).

Next, and this is where this fits in this thread, is that our retirement accounts were restructured to save the college money. We get a 6% match, and evidently the type of plan we get through TIAA-cref was multifaceted. They restructured it, and it supposedly costs the college a lot less in maintenance fees. Then, yesterday at the end of the day, our HR VP announced that this restructuring would come with an $80 service fee, collected from our retirement account directly.

Is this a normal practice? My personal Roth IRA/sweep account has a maintenance fee, but we've never had to pay a maintenance fee for our 401K. It seems like the college is just passing the cost to the employee in order to save money, or at least appear to save money.